Adam@SheekGeek

Installing and using Guitar Rig 5 Player in Reaper and Actually Recording Great-Sounding Music

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Some time ago, I got interested in modeling different amps and effects when recording guitar. I already used Reaper for recording for the last 10+ years, so I finally paid for the full license (only like $60). Reaper’s free version doesn’t have limitation in functionality, but does have a nag screen that pops up for 10 seconds when you start and you can’t use it commercially. Reaper is a full-featured DAW (Digital Audio Workspace) complete with pitch correction, MIDI and tons of other great features and plugins. On its own, you can record some nice quality music. The issue is external equipment… When you are cheap or broke, you likely don’t have one of every amp or pedal ever made to use when recording guitar. That’s where VST plugins come into play.

There are a lot of good VST plugins that allow you to make your guitar sound like it is going through any amp head, cabinet, effects pedal, etc. TH3 is one I played with for a while that I likes a lot, however the one I settled on that fit my needs best was Guitar Rig 5 Player. There’s a pro version as well, but the PLayer version is free. You could set it up on your computer as a stand-alone application, or as a VST plugin inside Reaper, Audacity, Ableton, etc. to record with. It is kind of complicated if you are unfamiliar with VST plugins or just getting started, so I made a how-to video to show step-by-step how to install and actually use Guitar Rig 5 player.



While it comes with a lot of patches to make you sound like different artists, or different songs, or even different styles, you can also google around and find patches online to download that other people have made for free. Note that if someone has the paid version of Guitar Rig 5 Pro, you might not be able to use their patch if it utilized amp and pedal models not available in the free version.

Plugging your guitar into the computer can be a bit of a challenge. You need some kind of interface. I’ve used a lot of things over the years. Up until recently, I used a lot of cheaper Behringer mixers and USB interfaces. I stopped because the drivers became an issue for my Windows 10 setup and Reaper. A friend of mine really like his Yamaha MG10XU mixer that has built-in effects. I’ve switched to what I see a lot of recording folks on youtube using, the Focusrite Scarlet 2i2. Its drivers play nice with everything (except OBS for some reason as you can see in the video above. This is not actually Focusrite’s fault, it’s all OBS’s fault since they don’t support ASIO audio drivers without a plugin and couple of workarounds). These options allow you to connect multiple channels at once so you can get mics and instruments at the same time.

Another option is to get a guitar pedal with a USB interface built in. There’s more on this option below.

Guitar Rig 5 Pro used to be sold with an awesome little MIDI pedal with multiple buttons and an expression pedal you could use to trigger different effects chains in the software or plugin, however it seems hard to find nowadays. Literally any MIDI controller would work, even something you can build yourself for cheap like the Mini UNTZtrument. If you build your own, I recommend forgoing the keypad and instead opt for some actual pedal pushbuttons, and maybe hack an old broken expression pedal from ebay or reverb nation as one of the pots. I’ll have another custom designed post within the next year or so from a project I’ve been working on (or rather which has been sitting on my desk) for a year or so now that is a guitar direct input/pedal/looper using a Teensy microcontroller. I’ve seen a lot of people using the SoftStep 2 and I nearly bought one of these myself (and still might actually…)

Eventually I wanted a bit more… A friend of mine had a Fractal AX8 which has a lot of this functionality built directly into a pedal (including a USB interface). Fractal makes really quality equipment.
A Perfect Circle and lots of other bands tour with Fractal modelers exclusively, then just run their audio out the venue’s monitors.

I can’t afford one of those. I looked for a lower cost solution. I wanted to be able to play without having to bring my laptop everywhere. I opted for a POD HD500x. The HD500X is a bit older, but it has a lot of these same capabilities built into a pedal form. In fact, in comparing to the AX8, there are a (very) few things in which the HD500x sounds a little better.

You can setup your own custom amp, pedal, and effect chains you want (within reason) using Line 6’s HD Pro software. Lots of other peoples’ patches are available for free download on Line 6’s website, but there are lots of people on youtube and online forums either sells or give away patches. This guy’s channel shows you how to set the patches up directly on the pedal itself.Check out the video below showing how that works. It looks quite similar to Guitar Rig Player 5 to some extent which made the switch to using it easy. You can also edit these presets and create new ones directly on the pedal itself if you want to. It is a ridiculously flexible piece of kit! It has a built-in tuner and even a 40 second looper which I love! You can run it as a pedal into an amp like normal (for live shows), or as a USB audio interface to just record awesome riffs, or as a pedal into another audio interface (this is what I typically do), or as a MIDI controller. You can use this as a complete replacement for the Focusrite Scarlet I mentioned above because it has a separate Mic input as well by using this patch. The only difference is that the HD500x doesn’t supply Phantom Power, so you’ll need a driver for that if you use a condenser mic, which is why I have the Scarlet. TIP: Don’t update the firmware to 2.6.2 because it’ll make a lot of the older patches sound horrible. Flash Firmware 2.6.1 is where it’s at. Luckily if you are dumb and updated it like I did, the Line6 Monkey program allows you to rollback the firmware.

I hope this article was helpful for you. Please comment to ask about other things in this area. I haven’t posted much about my music ever even though I’ve been playing and singing for like 20+ years at this point. I’ve only recently gotten more into recording more and digital tools.

Quick and Easy Method to Spice up the Builder Mirror in the Bathrooms

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Like most cookie-cutter plaster-of-paris houses in America, our bathroom mirrors had no frills. Just a reflective piece of glass on the wall to provide basic functionality and that’s it.  To make your bathroom look a bit fancier on the cheap and really easily, you’ll need the following:

  1. Low temp hot glue gun and glue
  2. Bathroom caulk
  3. Primed polystyrene (foam) Window/Door Casing (Enough to cover the perimeter of each mirror )
  4. Four Primed Rosettes
  5. Fine toothed saw of some kind (I highly recommend a miter box and a pull saw) The material is really easy to cut, but you want a nice clean straight edge that might be tough to achieve with a razor.

We’re getting primed moulding and rosettes because white works well with our bathroom colors and I’m lazy and don’t want to have to paint anything.

The first step is to measure out your cuts for the casing or moulding. This is actually kind of hard to do because we are going to have a rosette in each corner of the mirror. I tried an elaborate method of calculating this at first but ended up just having to go with the flow as things didn’t turn out how I expected at first.  Start with the rosettes. These will be in the corners of the mirror and what we want is to maximize mirror space. We don’t want to cover the mirror any more than we need to, so let’s say 1/2 of the casing thickness will cover the mirror. The casing and rosettes are the same thickness, so if we do 1/2 the thickness from the side, and 1/2 the thickness from the bottom, only 1/4 of the area of the rosette will actually be covering the mirror.  Pretty complicated to read but easy to see.

Now to attach these pieces we will have to use a two-step solution. We’ll apply both silicone caulk and low temp hot glue. The reason for this is that the hot glue by itself falls off after about a day or two (ask me how I know). The caulk will hold it great, however it doesn’t have enough tack force to hold the pieces in place long enough to dry when you apply it. So we’ll use the silicone caulk for long term stickitude, and the low-temp hot glue just to hold it on the glass until the caulk can set. Voila’.

Warning:  I used hot glue with no problem, and I used low temp hot glue. I don’t know what kind of hot glue gun you are using, or how your glass will react. If you shatter your bathroom mirror due to thermal stress it can be dangerous and will be totally your own fault. Do this at your own (slight) risk. If you are worried about how hot the glue is, then just apply it to the rosette and let it cool for a bit before applying it to the glass.

Put the rosette in the corner, and make sure to align it straight. You really only get one shot to stick it to the glass with the hot glue. If you get it wrong you’ll just have to pull it off, clean the glass and back of the rosette and try again. Once the hot glue touches the cools glass it nearly instantly sticks. After doing this a couple of times we got the hang of it. Again, use caution pulling this off the mirror if you need to because doing it wrong could break the corner of the mirror. It isn’t a huge worry, but just be careful.

Once you have the rosettes in the corners you can cut your moulding pieces to length. In our case I measured roughly and cut the casing, then wedged it in place and tweaked the cuts if I needed to. This was also a time when I realized that some of the rosettes were misaligned and I redid them yet again.

 

When applying the casing, you have to make one long line of hot glue and make it as straight as possible. This is on the back side of the moulding, however due to the thickness of the glass it can be seen. Also, once this foam material is on the mirror, you won’t easily get it off immediately without snapping it in half.

Once you get all the pieces on the mirror, caulk the connections between the casing the rosettes to complete the look.

I’m really overcomplicating the project. It was super easy and looks great with no painting required.

Midway and After shots of Mirror 1. You can see the transformation even in the first pic.

A simpler method is to find an old frame and paint it white and hang it. Check out what Jess did here:

Brighten Up Old Grout

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In our house, the kitchen had tile in it for some time. I’m not sure if the previous owner sealed the grout, but we thought it was supposed to be dark. Honestly, it just looked bad but I wasn’t about to regrout the whole thing. Instead, Jess brought home some grout paint.  I’ll say it still wasn’t easy to do, but with about 15ish hours of painting we finally got the floor looking good. It’s pretty uncomfortable sitting on tile floor for that long, so sitting on a pillow or using a kneeling cushion is helpful.

After this grout project, we installed hardwood floors everywhere else downstairs and in the master bedroom and both bathrooms upstairs.

Matching your Flight pictures with Google Earth

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Recently we flew out of state to visit family. I’m a huge nerd so I like to stare out the window and look at all the cool stuff. On this particular flight, I had driven the path in the past and kind of knew what to look for (BTW flying was about 1.5 hours, driving it was about 10 times that). As we passed interesting views; an oxbow lake, rivers, larger cities, mountains, lakes, windmill farms, etc. I took pictures with my cell phone. I had an idea of where we were and what I was looking at, but I wasn’t 100% sure.  I have the geotag feature turned off on my phone (as should you!) so I couldn’t figure out the locations based on that.  I found a neat way to answer my question. If you have an upcoming flight, you can try to find a similar flight path of a recently arrived flight and plan out what to take pics of, but note that actual flight paths vary with weather and traffic patterns of the actual day of flight. You can get in a good ballpark though.

As soon as you land and/or get home, visit flightaware.com and look up your flight number or city to city.  (This is where you can plan future flights as mentioned above). From here you can find your exact flight based on arrival times and all sorts of neat info about the particular plane you were on. Look for the “View track log” link in the right-hand column. It is easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it. 

 

Once here, you can see your flight, track it as t went along using GPS as well as altitude and speed date. The thing we are looking for is the Google Earth file download.

This will download a google Earth file. I recommend installing Google Earth Pro application on your PC, but you can use Google Earth through your browser to open this file.  You can then simulate your flight by adjusting the time bar located at the top left of the screen.

This will “draw” the path of your plane. You only have a couple of days maximum to get this Google Earth data for free. Otherwise you’ll have to use another service online and pay for it.

If you look at the timestamp of your pictures, you can get an idea of about where in the flight you were and move the camera there.  The timestamps didn’t match up perfectly for me but they were within about 2 minutes of when my pictures were timestamped. By knowing which side of the plane you were on you can move the camera to the planes position at that time, and look in the right direction. I then added a pin in google earth at that position, saved my perspective view and added the images from my computer to the description.

Here’s a great example of Knoxville from the air and in Google Earth (Click the pic below to see it bigger. you can see the river and landscape align in the picture and screenshot):

 

If you’ve been lucky enough to have clear skies on a day flight you can match things pretty easily. At night it can be harder to see some of the landforms and taking pics from the airplane window introduces more glare.  However, sometimes you get really lucky and you can catch things like Disney’s Firework Finale from 30,000ft like this:

You can even write a quick description in the Pin’s description tag. You can save this KMZ file and send it to friends and family who can also view it as well as the photos you linked.  (A KMZ file is actually a zip file containing the files you linked like pictures as well as a text file with the GPS coordinates which links to those files. It is kind of like a webpage). However, this makes your KMZ file pretty big (because it contains all your pics, make sure you squishify those images so they aren’t massive).  If you don’t want your grandma to have to download hundies of MB to see your trip journal you can drop all your images to a web shared folder like dropbox, googleDrive, Box, etc. and then instead of “Add Local Image” in the description, you can “Add web image” and paste the share link.

What cool pics or vids did you get from a plane? Post them in a comment.

Build Plate Adhesion on a 3D Printer

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I finally got a 3D printer of my own Spring 2018 and haven’t really had time to learn all the tips and tricks from everyone on great prints. For the couple of hours I spent with this thing, it prints well enough I suppose. At first I just didn’t have luck at all. In the past I had good luck with Painters tape, and even glue sticks on the old Printrbot Simple kits I used to use in summer camps I taught, but my RepRap Guru has a heated glass build plate. 

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For ages folks have tried recommending different materials to have your 3D prints stick to the build plate and all of them fall short in my eyes. I think I came across the perfect solution (pun intended).

First, here’s what I’ve seen and issues I had with them

  • Gluesticks: This makes a mess and in my experience doesn’t work well.
  • Painters tape: parts don’t come off of this easy and it’s expensive to continue to replace
  • Sugar: Sticky and messy.
  • Expensive build-plates:  Expensive…

The best solution I’ve come across which gives amazing results is salt water. The parts stick to the glass really well, but then when the print is done, the build plate cools down, the part comes off without any effort whatsoever. In most cases, I pick the part up without having to pull or pry at all. 

For cheapness, I make my own solution usually, but recently tried premixed saline solutions.  To make your own, get a small glass of water, warm it in the microwave until it’s as hot as warm tea, then slowly add salt to it until no more will dissolve. Use a cotton ball, cotton swab, or paper towel dipped in this water to smear a layer of salt water on the glass build plate. Wait until it dries and forms a nice crystalline layer. You can see in the pic above that the build plate looks dirty, but it it’s just salt.  You can heat the bed to help the water evaporate quicker if you are anxious.

While looking for a better or quicker application method, I tried NeilMed Nasal wash. This sprays out in a good even mist and coats the entire plate in literally 1 second. Then I warm the build plate to evaporate the water and print.  The one in the image is “hypotonic” solution, which doesn’t have as much salt as the “hypertonic” solution.  The hypertonic solution might work better, but the standard solution works great.  I usually don’t wash it off between prints unless I notice a clean spot on the glass. Then I’ll rinse the glass, dry with a cloth, then sprits it again with the spray.